Sports

Due to the harrowing reality that the campus is without basketball and volleyball courts for the time being, students have been left to question when they will get their beloved gym back.

According to Jessica Way, Director of Student Center and Event Operations and Campus Recreation at Sonoma State University, the restoration of the Everest Gym floor is set to commence in a few weeks, and is scheduled to be finished by late October.

Way has been the focal figure in handling Rec Center operations, and the one that has spent a significant amount of time on this issue with the Everest Gym.

In May of last year, a rogue soccer ball met one of the Everest Gym’s fire sprinklers, and from this collision, water coated the entire Everest gym floor. Engineering was phoned immediately following the incident, and the water was shut off within 30 minutes of the initial breakage. Way personally insisted her relationship with this particular incident was not a great one.

“We are not friends” she said, referring to the pipe burst.

Time could only tell what the gym floor’s response would be to the water, whether it would or wouldn’t result in the hardwood floor bowing. Once it was clear the hardwood floor did indeed begin to bow, Way immediately phoned to outside sources, beginning the process of restoring the gym floor.

Now, this is where the head-scratching, hair-pulling, floor -stomping phase of the process reared its ugly head. At the beginning of the summer, with the ideas of what needed to be done in hand, the paperwork was drawn up.

It shouldn’t be hard for anyone to understand this is a reasonably elongated process, and without question a detailed approach was needed to be taken by all parties involved.

Since Sonoma State is a public institution, there’s a laundry list of laws and obligations the school must follow in order to carry out a project of this magnitude legally.

Work was alleged to begin in early August befor students moved in for the fall semester, but due to a misallocation of the paperwork processing, the operation was stopped dead in its tracks.

Try not to buy the narrative that the the head of Rec Operations at Sonoma State doesn’t care about our on-campus athletic resources-- you couldn’t be more wrong. The process is complicated, but the school understands how important the courts are to athletes here.

“For face value, it looks like there is nothing physically happening, where all the work is happening right this moment is in offices,” Way said.

Those involved in the restoration understand that the moment you enter the Rec you are greeted by a cream tarp covering one of the three large entrances that reveals seemingly nothing being done to improve the state of our gym floor.

However, the real work, to restore ground the Everest Gym is a particular topic of urgency, and if all goes to plan, Seawolves are going to have their Everest back in no time.